In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I was afraid this tone, this way of inviting someone while implying that he should not come, would offend Bloch; and I thought Saint-Loup would have been better to say nothing. In this I was mistaken, for after the train had left, and as Bloch and I were walking together as far as the crossroads where our paths diverged, one of them leading towards the hotel, the other towards his villa, he kept asking which day we would go to Doncières, since in view of ‘all the overtures of Saint-Loup towards him’ it would be ‘too ill-mannered of him’ not to accept the invitation. I was glad that he had either not noticed, or was unoffended enough to wish to appear not to have noticed, the less than eager tone, almost impolite, in which the invitation had been delivered. However, for his sake, I would have preferred him to avoid the ridicule of going over to Doncières straight away. I did not dare advise him on this, though, as I could only have done so in a way which would displease him, by revealing that Saint-Loup’s eagerness to invite had been much less than his own to accept. He was in fact over-eager; and though all his faults in that line were compensated by remarkable qualities, which someone less forward would not have had, he was so tactless that it was a constant annoyance. According to him, we must not let the week pass without visiting Doncières (he said ‘we’ because, I think, he was half-counting on my presence to excuse his). All the way along the road, in front of the gymnasium among its trees, by the tennis court, in front of the town hall, in front of the sea-shell vendor’s, he kept making me stop, begging me to settle on a day; and as I declined, he walked off in a huff, saying, ‘As it please Your Lordship, then. But I at least am obliged to go, since he did invite me.’

  Saint-Loup was so uneasy at the thought of not having properly thanked my grandmother that he asked me again to be sure to pass on his gratitude to her, in a letter that I received two days later. It was from the town where he was garrisoned, the name of which postmarked on the envelope seemed to be bringing it to me, telling me that inside its walls, in the Louis XVI cavalry barracks, he was thinking of me. The notepaper bore the arms of Marsantes, in which I could make out a lion on a crown closed by the cap of a peer of France.

  ‘After a successful journey, his letter said, during which I read a book bought in the station, by Arvède Barine92 (a Russian writer, I believe; it struck me as remarkably well written for a foreigner, but do give me your view, you who must know, as you’ve read everything and are a mine of knowledge), here I am once more back in this coarse life where I feel like an exile, where I have nothing of what I left in Balbec, a life without reminders of affection, devoid of the charm of intellectual things, a life lived in an atmosphere which you would no doubt despise, yet which is not without its own charm. Everything seems to have changed since I left, for in the meantime something has marked an era in my life: the beginning of our friendship. I hope it will never end. I have spoken of it, and of you, to a single person, my darling mistress, who gave me a pleasant surprise by coming down here to spend a moment with me. She would like to meet you; and I’m sure you would get on together, as she too is extremely literary. On the other hand, the better to remember the talks we had together, you and I, to recall times I’ll never forget, I have also been keeping away from my fellow officers, who, though capital chaps, would be incapable of appreciating such things. For this first day, I could almost have preferred to keep the memory of our times together to myself, rather than write about it. But I was afraid that you, with your subtle mind and your ultra-sensitive heart, might begin to worry if you received no letter – assuming, that is, that you have deigned to lower your thoughts to the rough trooper whom you will be hard put to refine, to make a little more subtle and worthy of you.’

  This letter, by its affectionateness, was really very reminiscent of those which, at a time when I did not know Saint-Loup, I had imagined him writing to me, in the day-dreams eventually cancelled by the icy reality of his initial greeting, which had proved not to be his definitive manner. After that first letter, each time the post was brought in, at lunch-time, I recognized instantly any letter from him, as they all showed the second face which every person has, the one seen in his or her absence, and in the features of which (the letters of the script) there is no reason not to believe we can see the individual spirit so clearly perceptible in the line of their nose or the tones of their voice.

  At the end of lunch, I was inclined now to sit on as the tables were being cleared; and if it was not a moment at which the little gang of girls could be expected to pass, my eyes looked on things other than the sea. Since seeing such things in the water-colours of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the old-fashioned chairs, which twice a day take their places again about the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster-shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of ‘still life’.

  Some days after the departure of Saint-Loup, when I had managed to prompt Elstir to hold a little reception at which I would be able to meet Albertine, I was rather sorry that the charm and elegance, albeit momentary, on which I was complimented as I stepped out of the Grand-Hôtel, which were the result of a long rest and extra expenditure on appearance, could not be reserved, along with the prestige of Elstir, for my conquest of some other more interesting person, rather than being lavished on Albertine and the pleasure of making her acquaintance. My mind saw this pleasure, now that it was assured, as being worth not very much. But the will in me did not share that illusion for an instant, being the persevering and unwavering servant of our successive personalities, hidden in the shadows, disdained, forever faithful, working unceasingly, and without heeding the variability of our self, making sure it shall never lack what it needs. When a journey we have longed to make begins to become a reality, and the mind and sensibility are starting to wonder whether it is really worth the effort, the will, which well knows that, if it turned out the journey could not be made, these feckless masters would immediately long for it to become possible again, lets them loiter in front of the station, having their say, hesitating until the last minute, while it makes sure of buying the tickets and getting us into the train before departure time. It is as invariable as the mind and sensibility are changeable; but because it is silent and never gives its reasons, it seems almost non-existent; all the other parts of our self march to its tune unawares, though they can always see clearly their own uncertainties. So my mind and sensibility set up a debate on how much pleasure there might be in making the acquaintance of Albertine, while in front of the mirror I considered the vain and fragile charms which they would have preferred to preserve unused for some better occasion. But my will did not lose sight of the time at which I had to leave; and it was Elstir’s address which it gave to the coachman. My mind and sensibility, now that the die was cast, indulged in the luxury of thinking it was a pity. If my will had given a different address, they would have been in a state of panic.

  On arriving at Elstir’s a little later, I thought at first that Mlle Simonet was not in the studio. There was only a young lady, sitting down, wearing a silk dress, bare-headed, but whose magnificent hair was unknown to me, as were her nose and complexion, in none of which could I recognize the being I had constructed out of a young girl walking along the esplanade, pushing a bicycle and wearing a toque. Albertine it was, however. Yet, even after realizing this, I paid no attention to her. On going into a fashi
onable gathering as a young man, one takes leave of the person one was, one becomes a different man, each new salon being a new universe, in which, subject to the law of a new moral perspective, we focus acute attention on individuals, dances, games of cards, as though they were destined to be part of our life for ever, and which we will have forgotten by the following morning. Being obliged, in order to come eventually to a chat with Mlle Simonet, to follow a route which was not of my own design, which reached a first destination in front of Elstir, before leading me on to other groups of guests, to whom I was introduced, then along the buffet where I was handed, and where I ate, strawberry tarts, while pausing to listen to music which had just begun to be played, I found myself giving to these various episodes the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle Simonet, which was only one among their sequence, and which I had by now completely forgotten had been, a few minutes before, the sole object of my presence there. Does not the same happen, in busy everyday life, to our truest joys and greatest sorrows? We stand among other people, and the woman we adore gives us the answer, favourable or fatal, which we have been awaiting for a year: we must go on chatting; ideas lead to other ideas, making a surface beneath which, rising only from time to time, barely perceptible, lies the knowledge, very deep but acute, that calamity has struck. Or if it is happiness rather than calamity, we may not remember until years later that the most momentous event of our emotional life happened in a way which gives us no time to pay close attention to it, or even to be aware of it almost, during a fashionable reception, say, despite the fact that it was in expectation of some such event that we had gone to it.

  At the moment when Elstir suggested I go with him and be introduced to Albertine, who was sitting a little way away, I finished a coffee eclair and inquired with interest of an old gentleman, whom I had just met and to whom I saw fit to offer the rose he had admired in my button-hole, about certain agricultural shows in Normandy. This is not to say that the introduction which followed gave me no pleasure, or that it did not have a character of some gravity in my eyes. The pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again. Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark-room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

  Unlike the awareness of my pleasure, delayed for some hours, the gravity of the introduction was perceptible to me at the time. At a moment of introduction, though we feel an immediate gratification, though we know we are now in possession of a voucher valid for future pleasures of the sort we have been seeking for weeks past, we also sense that its possession puts an end, not only to our wearisome searching, a reason for unmitigated joy, but also to the existence of a particular person, the figment created in our imagination and magnified by the fretful fear that we might never come to be acquainted with that person. At the moment when our name sounds in the voice of our introducer, and especially if the latter accompanies it, as Elstir did, with words of praise (a moment as sacramental as the one in pantomimes when the genie commands a person to turn all of a sudden into someone else), the girl we have been longing to approach vanishes – for one thing, how could she go on being the same, since, by the very attention she is obliged to give to our name and display to our person, the conscious gaze and unknowable mind which we had been vainly seeking in her eyes, which were infinitely distant from us yesterday, and which we thought our own eyes, wandering, unfocussed, desperate, divergent, would never manage to meet, have just been miraculously and simply replaced by our own image, pictured as by a smiling mirror? If our own reincarnation as something which formerly seemed as distant as possible from ourselves is what most transforms the unknown girl to whom we have just been introduced, her own form is still rather vague; and we may wonder whether she will turn into a goddess, a table or a bowl.93 With the agility of a wax-modeller who, as we watch, can make a bust in five minutes, the few words she is about to speak will rough out her form and give it something definitive, eliminating every single hypothesis which our desire and imagination had elaborated. Before she attended Elstir’s little party, Albertine was no doubt not quite the mere phantom that a passer-by becomes, whom we have barely glimpsed, of whom we know nothing and who may haunt our life thereafter. Her being related to Mme Bontemps had already restricted these marvellous hypotheses, by blocking off one of the channels via which they might have proliferated. As I came closer to the girl and gradually knew her better, my acquaintance with her proceeded by subtraction, as each part of her made out of imagination and desire was replaced by a perception worth much less, although to each of these perceptions was added a sort of equivalent in human relations of that ‘continuing dividend’ which finance companies go on paying after the redeeming of the original share. Her name and her family connections had fixed a first limit to my suppositions. Another was set by the pleasantness of her manner as I stood beside her, noticing again the beauty spot on her cheek, just under the eye; and I was astonished to hear her use the adverb ‘perfectly’ instead of ‘completely’ when talking of two people, one of whom she said was ‘perfectly mad, but really quite nice’ and the other ‘perfectly common person, and perfectly boring’. Inelegant as it was, this usage of ‘perfectly’ suggested a level of cultivation far above what I would have imagined to be that of the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf-course. And after that initial metamorphosis, Albertine was of course to go through many other changes in my eyes. The qualities and faults of any person, as they appear in the foreground of the face, will be arranged in a different order if we come upon them from another angle, as the landmarks of a city, seen lying along a straight line in a random order, are shuffled into different dimensions of depth, and exchange among themselves their relative sizes, when glimpsed from another point of view. At the beginning, I thought Albertine looked somewhat intimidated, rather than ruthless; she seemed proper, and not ill-mannered, judging by statements she made about every one of the girls I mentioned to her, such as ‘She’s very “fast” ’ or ‘She’s perfectly unladylike’; and the focal point of her face was one of her temples, flushed and unpleasing to look at, instead of the singular expression in her eyes, which until then had been the thing about her which had always been in my thoughts. But this was only my second sight of her, and there would undoubtedly be a sequence of other points of view from which I would have to see her. To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them which we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

  Yet, whatever disappointments it is bound to bring, that way of approaching what one has glimpsed, what one has had the leisure to imagine, is the only wholesome one for the senses, the only one which keeps them in appetite. What monotony and boredom colour the lives of those who, from laziness or timidity, drive directly to the houses of friends whom they have come to know, without first having imagined them, without ever daring to dally along the way with what they desire!

  On my way home from Elstir’s little reception, I thought about it, remembering the coffee eclair which I had finished before letting him take me to meet Albertine, the rose I had given to the old gentleman, all these details selected without our knowledge by the circumstances and which, in their special haphazard arrangement, constitute our picture of a first meeting. It was this same picture that, some months later, I had the impression of seeing from another point of view, one very remote from my own, and of realizing that it had not existed only fo
r me: one day, as I spoke to Albertine about our first meeting, to my amazement she reminded me of the eclair, the flower I had given away, everything which I believed, not to be of importance only to myself, but to have been noticed only by me, and yet here they were, transcribed in a version which I had not suspected existed, in the mind of Albertine. Back at the hotel on that first day, when I could focus on the memory I had taken away with me, I saw the conjuring-trick which had been done, and how I had spent some time chatting to a person who, by the magician’s sleight of hand, had been substituted for the girl I had watched so often along the esplanade, and who had nothing in common with her. This I could have suspected in advance, as the young girl on the esplanade had been my own creation. Even so, since I had identified her with Albertine in my conversations with Elstir, I now felt a moral obligation towards the real Albertine to keep the promises of love made to the imaginary one. Betrothed by proxy, we feel constrained to marry the intermediary. Besides, though my life was now at least temporarily free of an anguish any recurrence of which could have been quickly cancelled by the memory of her properness, the expression ‘perfectly common’ and the flushed temple, this memory now roused in me a different sort of desire, which, though sweet and quite painless, rather like a brotherly feeling, was capable of becoming in time just as dangerous, by giving me a constant need to kiss this new person, whose good manners, shyness and unexpected availability curbed the futile surges of my imagination, but gave rise to a touching gratitude. Also, since memory immediately begins to take snap-shots which are quite independent of one another, abolishing all links and sequence among the scenes they show, in the collection of them which it displays, the latest does not necessarily obliterate the earlier ones. Beside the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted, I could see the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea. Both were now memories, pictures, that is, neither of which seemed truer than the other. The final image of my introduction to her that afternoon was that when I tried to remember the little beauty spot on her cheek, just below the eye, I realized that, after my first sight of her, when she had greeted Elstir in passing, I had seen it on her chin. Each time I saw Albertine, I noticed she had a beauty spot, and my misguided memory moved it about her face, sometimes putting it in one place, at other times in another.